Guild's Eye
View: Rewarding Leadership?

In Guild's Eye View this week,
MMORPG.com columnist Sean
Stalzer takes a look at the
importance of leadership and the
right leaders are to the success
of a community within any MMO.
Check out Sean's thoughts about
leadership and community. Leave
us a couple thoughts when
finished!

Strong communities are the
lifeblood of successful
MMORPGs. Competent
Leadership is one of the
building blocks to a successful
community. Regardless of
how awesome the content of the
game is.... or how great the
people playing the game are....
or how common sense the guild's
rules are.... or how focused the
vision of the guild is.... or
how innovative the tools for
community management are... if
the guild leader/leadership are
not competent, the community
will ultimately fail and often
that failure will be
spectacularly explosive.
Such explosive failures end up
ruining the game for some
players who leave that MMORPG
entirely. Community
failures, generally speaking,
weaken the overall fabric of the
MMORPG and a weak community
makes for a weak MMO.

That premise then begs the
question: How does one get
and retain competent leadership?

In "the real world" to obtain a
leadership position one generally
has to prove oneself first.
Whether you are in the military or
part of a corporation generally
speaking you don't walk up and ask
to be CEO, Manager or even Chief
Peon and get welcomed with open
arms. There is a process by
which you will demonstrate the
skills and the qualities that
organization is seeking. You
generally "pay your dues" within
that company and earn a spot or
you come with a resume loaded with
good credentials of other places
you paid your dues and had
tangible, meaningful success to
point to.

Even with there being some sort
of process, more than 60% of all
people promoted to a leadership
position in the "real world"
fail in that position.
That is a staggering number
especially when you consider
there was some sort of process
to filter candidates and, in
theory, pick talented
people. Clearly reality
and theory do not align more
than 6 times out of 10.

Within the virtual world, no
such process exists. While
most modern games have a
requirement that to become a
"leader" of your own clan you
need to find "X" people (often 3
to 10 others) to "join" you to
create the entity, that is a
requirement easily met by
spamming for help in the local
general chat channel. In
short: Anyone can (and does)
create an entity and become a
"leader" even if that is only in
name. That, of course,
leads to a much higher
percentage than 6 in 10 leaders
failing (i.e. guilds imploding
due to poor leadership).
While one could take the point
of view that it serves the
'leader' right that their guild
failed (and I wouldn't argue
with that), the core issue is
the community impact; not the
ego-impact to the failed
leader. When guild's
implode, the members
suffer. To continue the
analogy from other recent
articles, strands of the
spiderweb that makes up the
community get cut and when
enough get cut, things
implode. So the
question of how does one get and
retain competent leadership is
one of community stability.

There are two possible paths
forward to address that question
(other than the 'do-nothing'
approach). There is
Negative Reinforcement and
Positive Reinforcement.
Negative Reinforcement could be
in the form of adding
gate-keeper processes to limit
who could start a guild to only
those with some level of
competency. That is not
feasible in the MMO world as
both the mechanisms do not exist
to fairly measure competency nor
is there support among the
overall community to limit
someone from trying. As a
general rule, the overall
community has a sense of
empowerment (i.e. let people
try.. they may surprise us and
succeed!) and since this is an
entertainment business telling
someone they are not good enough
to try an aspect of the
entertainment they pay for
wouldn't be the right message to
send. Much like in real
life, negative reinforcement
doesn't work all that well in
the long term and probably much
less so within the online world
than in the real world.

Since limiting who can run a
guild to only competent leaders
is not feasible nor likely
advisable from a social
engineering standpoint... and
since we can't even get this
problem fixed in the 'real
world' (i.e. what makes us think
the virtual world will be any
more solvable using 'real world'
methods when we have less data,
less control and higher
expectations of entitlement and
empowerment to deal with)...
"eliminating" poor leadership
from ever establishing a guild
is probably not the goal to aim
for. But, there is
potentially a valid goal in
rewarding good leadership.

The question of what defines
"good leadership" is a massive
debate in and of itself and not
one I intend to wade into in
this article. Rather, I
would contend that once a
definition of "good" is
established that putting in
place positive reinforcement for
leaders that meet that
definition is a benefit to the
community. The benefits
come in several forms.

First, a wider array of
competent people get attracted
to leadership roles if there is
a reward in it. While "success
is its own reward" is a comment
some might make, most humans
don't work that way. Most
people do a cost-benefit
analysis and realize long hours;
drama; politics; trolls;
administrative logistics and all
of the other tasks that go along
with even a small to mid-sized
guild is a big cost to try to
counter balance with the
"success is its own reward"
argument. There are
certainly people that do believe
that success is its own reward
and they are actively leading
successful guilds of raiders;
pvpers; casual players etc.. all
across the gaming world.
But those successful groups are
a small fraction of the total
gaming population. There
are other people out in the
gaming world who have the
talents needed to lead an
organization successfully but
who don't step forward as the
cost/benefit equation is too
heavily slanted towards
'cost'. So figuring out
how to at least balance the
equation widens the pool of good
leaders and thus creates more
stable communities and thus
strengthens the overall
spiderweb that forms the greater
gaming community.

Second, having goals to work
towards often motivates people
to do more and invest more into
their organizations.
Individually we see that in
ourselves and others each time
we play games. When there
are suitable rewards to obtain,
that we place enough value in,
we put in more hours with the
game to earn them. The
same principle applies to those
leading organizations.
And, when a competent leader
invests more time in their
organization, the whole team
benefits.

Third, one of the leading
causes of community implosion is
when the leader chooses to
leave. Providing that
incentive to stay engaged and
moving the organization forward
will keep more leaders involved
for a longer period of
time. That involvement
means a more stable overall
community; less turnover of
players from games; and more fun
for everyone involved.
Community implosion costs the
developer revenue (in the form
of lost players) and it costs
players fun (in the form of
drama; finding a new group to
fit into; and often resetting
themselves to 0 in the pecking
order of the new group).

In summary, there is no silver
bullet to community stability
and making everyone get along
without problems. If there
was, we'd have world peace and
no crime. The virtual
world is even harder since there
is an added element of anonymity
that causes some people to
behave in ways that they
wouldn't if they were standing
in front of you or worked in
your office or were on your
sports team (when was the last
time someone ninja'd all the
snacks from the end of a kids
soccer game?). But, that
doesn't mean improvements can't
or shouldn't be made towards the
stability of online
communities. When
communities implode, everyone
involved in the community
suffers. Improving the
chances of community success or
lengthening the average time a
community remains stable are all
value added achievements to the
online landscape. One tool
in that toolbox would be to
define a way to measure 'good
leadership' and then reward
leaders within your communities
for achieving those goals.
That is one way to promote
stability at the micro and macro
guild/community level.